Women, feminism, and geek culture

Owning our awesome

Inspired by Kate, Karen, and Denise, and as a sort of Unicorn Chaser to the last post about Facebook’s failings and flailings, let’s talk about awesome things we’ve done recently!Â They don’t need to be technical or even geeky.

I’ll go first in the comments. This thread will be hosted by pretty lasers.

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13 thoughts on “Owning our awesome”

This week I: followed up with a contact from a conference on her offer of a free developer phone, and she’s sending me one! I got ops in #ubuntu-ca, put up an agenda for our first meeting in a dog’s age, hosted an Ubuntu Lucid release party at the HackLab, and generally lit a fire under folks there. And I compiled the SVN version of Blender from source. Woot!

I was reappointed for a second term to the Asia/Oceania Ubuntu Regional Membership Board. I got to announce a new sponsor for the Ubuntu Women World Play Day competition I’ve been organising for the past few weeks, and this morning, nominated myself for the Ubuntu Women leadership committee/council/thingie. Whee!

I produced some optimizations for a code that made a man working on a different code in the same project finally take interest in what I was doing and ask me to help him. He previously ignored my contributions because I am a computer scientist so I couldn’t possibly have anything good to contribute to Physics. But when I make your loops an order of magnitude faster, that turns heads, I guess! Here’s to efficient cache utilization!

I’m working (slowly, very slowly –health and thesis keep getting in the way) on the skills I need to get involved in Ubuntu development (specifically, packaging).

I’m also exploring some art/design things thanks to the realization I had about myself trying to come up with a post on the Shapely Prose thread linked in this post. My supplies just arrived yesterday.

So, mine is non-technical but last week I chaired a meeting where everyone else was much older than me, and there has been a history of power struggles and marginalising some voices. I don’t think this body has been chaired by a woman for several years, when it was done once, and she was torn to pieces (there have been significant changes in membership since then.) It was a productive meeting and comments were later made that I had done a good job of chairing it. Not “well for a woman” or “well for someone so young.” Just well.

After reading an entry from the Geek Girls Network about gender and geekiness and seeing the accompanying graphic I was inspired to spend a few minutes of my free time today making a “poster” of a few types of geeks that reflects people I have actually met and is not just a poster of white men…..